Abstract
The optimization of a near-circular low-Earth-orbit multispacecraft refueling problem is studied. The refueling sequence, service time, and orbital transfer time are used as design variables, whereas the mean mission completion time and mean propellant consumed by orbital maneuvers are used as design objectives. The term of the Earth’s nonspherical gravity perturbation and the constraints of rendezvous time windows are taken into account. A hybrid-encoding genetic algorithm, which uses normal fitness assignment to find the minimum mean propellant-cost solution and fitness assignment based on the concept of Pareto-optimality to find multi-objective optimal solutions, is presented. The proposed approach is demonstrated for a typical multispacecraft refueling problem. The results show that the proposed approach is effective, and that the perturbation and the time-window constraints have considerable influences on the optimization results. For the problems in which the perturbation is not accounted for, the optimal refueling order can be simply determined as a sequential order or as the order only based on orbital-plane differences. In contrast, for the problems that do consider the perturbation, the optimal solutions obtained have a variety of refueling orders and use the drift of nodes effectively to reduce the propellant cost for eliminating orbital-plane differences.
Published Version
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